Monogram Styles Used:

Five and Dime XL Monogram Set

Monogram: FDG

A customer called us recently to ask if we offered a "universal" monogram. She was working with a decorator who wanted to create something special for decorating a pillow, but didn't want to use a specific set of recognizable letters. She wanted a design that had the look and feel of a traditional monogram but was "universal" - it could be used for any client regardless of their name and initials.

We don't offer anything like this, but got the concept immediately and thought if would be an interesting project, and one that our website visitors might enjoy and want to try themselves.

We made the initial decision that we would use letters from our Five and Dime XL Monogram Set, and that we would try to select letters that were as "swirly" as possible. In our embroidery software program we started with the larger D, rotated it approximately 140 degrees and then mirrored it vertically. Next we merged the letter F, placing it to the left and mirroring it vertically. We then merged the letter G on the right side, but this time just rotated it 180 degrees without any mirroring.

This basic combination needed a bit more tweaking. Each letter was manipulated individually - a stretch here, a squash there, and with some experimentation with placing each letter relative to eachother we ended up with the combination pictured here. The letters are overlapped, so we manually deleted a few stitches from the small sections of the center letter where the flanking letters cross over to miniumize any "bum" in those areas.

We could have done this all in one color, but thought it was a bit more interesting to use two similar shades of green.

The overall size is 8" (203 mm) tall by 8 3/8" (213 mm) wide.

How we made these monograms

Embroidery software programs make it easy to delete elements, copy and paste elements from other designs, resize different aspects, and merge elements together into one new design. Each program is a bit different in how the Edit functions are managed. Once you have learned to use yours, creating new monograms from other monogram parts is creative and fun. Experiment with different arrangements and colors.